Well, Jean Yves put up beta 0.2 of Midnight/Mu yesterday. Fantastic night of frantic gaming ensued. I was up till 2am playing my games and trying to keep up with the forum. It’s a large step forward and almost there now, so hopefully not long before it gets an open release.
Doomdark’s Revenge
Just a quick update on Doomdark’s Revenge.
Work has been usually slow, however the graphical changes that Jure and I are making are increasing the visual appeal all the time.
I fixed a number of issues with the tunnel rendering code and this is now almost complete. Just to give you and update on the issues; they are one of view angle. In DDR we took the decision to only allow N E S W view points. This is in keeping with the original in that only movement is allowed on these axis. However we extended this to the UI in order to avoid looking in directions that are not valid.
A point of interest that came up during testing is that of the old DOOM 2d sprite view. ie: Whichever way you look, the sprite faces you. This is the same for the original LOM and DDR. We have kept this mechanic on the landscaping view, however we found that applying this technique in tunnels really jars. The problem is in simplicity that if looking north along a tunnel, there is a stone pillar on your left. When you move up the tunnel and look south it should be on your right. When this is not the case it looks just plain wrong… however your mind seems to except this in the landscaping view, ie: You should see the back of a keep etc…
We added coded haze between all the landscape terrain scales. This has a big impact on the visual quality of the graphics.
Jure is currently working on all the time states skies and floors etc.
I think most of the landscape graphics are done now, and all the dynamic stuff to give multiple terrain variations works really well. Jure has worked hard on this area; the amount of work put into the forests is amazing. You really won’t feel like it’s a tile forest anymore.
I would be interested to hear people’s views on 3d cards. I am considering taking TME over to use 3d hardware, not in a real 3d way but harnessing the power of the GPU to help process the increasing graphical workload. I know that older machines do not all have the luxury or 3d cards, but I would be interesting in hearing from anyone interested in playing LOM and DDR who do not have 3d support or have very old support.
I have had a number of talks with Matt Davies ( sorry can’t remember the correct number id!
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Stonehenge
I have posted an article that I wrote on the Summer Solstice. I’ve placed it in the June archive where it rightly belongs.
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Horses – Part II
Driving to work this morning, I noticed two New Forest workers picking up fallen Oak branches. For those of you not familiar with the dietry requirements of horses, oak is poisonous to them. A great many plants are in fact, a very common one is St John’s Wort. I often notice “weeding” parties removing this plant from fields that contains horses.
Anyway, I wondered this morning why man must intervene to stop a horse from either making itself poorly or even killing itself due to eating these life threatening substances. Surely evolution would have helped them to work out what not to eat by now. Anyway, I was going to label the Horse as officially stupider than cows (see previous post) , but then it occured to me… this is what man does all the time with Alcohol, Cigarettes, and Drugs. So maybe horses are only as stupid as us!
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Matt Goss
Strange one yesterday, I heard the new single ‘Fly’ from Matt Goss ( Bros, to those of you old enough to remember ) Anyway, I was pleasantly suprised, it was very good. I heard it it the car driving to work, and then again on the way home.
Now, I’m pretty liberal with music, I like pretty much anything ( except random jazz stuff ), but I still get suprised when people who’s music I didn’t like before suddenly come out with something good.